Web 2.0 This Week August 14 – 20 It’s late on Sunday night and I have so much to write about – this last week was absolutely amazing. I met so many interesting people at Bar Camp and added their blogs to my Pluck reader. I am now reading over 320 blogs and loving the Internet more than ever. I’m tired, but full of energy! This week’s summary is below. As I’ve mentioned before, Richard MacManus writes a weekly wrapup as well that takes a different angle than us. I highly recommend subscribing to his blog. I also want to point quickly to Weblogswork, the creators of ElfURL. Nice blog! There’s some good stuff going on over there. If you are serious about Web 2.0, you’ll also want to subscribe to Clarence Wooten‘s site. He doesn’t write often, but when he does it’s required reading. 1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week Delicious (Update), Vemail, Kahuna, BittyBrowser, VitalSource, Goowy, Technorati (Update), Blogtronix, Protopage, Rojo (Update), Bar Camp, Skylook, Pandora 2. Nielsen Releases New Blog Study Last Monday Nielsen released a new blog study called “Understanding the Blogosphere”. Key stats from the study: The top 50 blogging and blog-related sites grew 31 percent to 29.3 million unique visitors during July 11 percent of blog readers use RSS 50% of respondents have at least heard of RSS For another study published this week (on tagging), see Smart Mobs post here and Libary Stuff’s post here. PDF here. Additional Reading: TechWeb, Weblogswork, Jeff Nolan, Editor&Publisher, Burnham’s Beat, Jeff Clavier, RexBlog 3. Hunter S. Thompson’s Funderal I really loved his books (my favorite was The Rum Diary). I like to think that Mr. Thompson would be very much a blogger if he was still writing today (that’s my web 2.0 angle for this). He requested, and received, a spectacular funeral that involved mixing his cremated remains with fireworks and firing them off. I wish I could have been there. 4. Is Plaxo Evil? Is it a Web 2.0 Company? Robert Scoble met with Plaxo last week and wrote a post about it. I was in a cranky mood that day and got into it with Plaxo employees in the comments section. I regret writing those comments, and I plan on profiling the positive aspects of the service sometime this week. By the way, shortly after this post (although I forgot to ask Robert what the actual → Read More
Day 2 of Bar Camp was, if possible, more interesting than Day 1 (perhaps becasue Day 1 was only 5 hours, while Day 2 was a full 24 hours). I had to slip out in the late afternoon to go to the OPML Editor road show in Berkeley, but saunterd back in late evening just as the drinking binge was getting into full swing. But the drinking and partying was justified. It was a long and productive day. Notes below. Once again, I need to point out that I saw only a small fraction of the total stuff that was going on. Bar Camp on Slashdot Andy Smith flickrs it. It’s also the most popular tag on Flickr right now. Pandora The most exciting presentation of the day was Pandora. I wasn’t there for it, of course, but Tom Conrad, Padora’s CTO, gave me a private demo earlier in the day and I profiled it here. Make sure you check this one out. Robert Scoble likes it too and has additional company information. Flock Flock (“Social browser based on the Mozilla engine to give you the tools to talk back to the web”) gave an excellent presentation showing off their brand new stuff. I have a beta invite and will be profiling Flock this week. People I met some incredibly interesting people yesterday, including Kevin Burton, Robert Scoble, and Eris Stassi (who created the Bar Camp logo). I was also able to spend time hanging out with Sam Perry, who I first met at Always On and who is becoming a good friend. Had a late night dinner with Steve Gillmor, Dave Winer, Niall Kennedy, Robert Scoble and Buzz Bruggeman as well. WikiWyg I didn’t realize I broke the WikyWyg news in my Day 1 notes. This was blogged on by Jeff Jarvis later as well yesterday, and Ross Mayfied announced it on his blog. This is going to be talked about a lot in the coming weeks. T-Shirts Do I look like I can fit into a medium tshirt? For the love of God, people, get your act together and order some more XL tshirts! On a related note, do you really think you can leave boxes of KitKats and other junk food around and I won’t eat 10 of them? That’s irresponsible. Heading back now for more presentations and junk food. By the way, our Day 1 Notes → Read More
Product: OPML Editor Founder: Dave Winer Dave Winer has been working on outlining software for over 20 years. Check out his OPML Editor (OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language) that has recently come out of private beta – people are using it for everything from writing and updating simple to-do lists to creating and editing blogs. It’s extremely versatile and it’s open source. OPML an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments. Link Since people are writing exhaustively about the product and the technology (and using it for incredibly creative things), I want to talk about it from a different angle. For those of you familiar with Seth Godin, you’ll know what a Purple Cow is. The basic idea of the purple cow is that for products to be noticed in today’s world of fragmented attention and product saturation, it has to be something really special. You don’t notice cows any more no matter how cool they are (because they are basically all the same), but you sure would notice a big purple cow munching on some grass in a field somewhere. Dave has in my opinion masterfully crafted a purple cow with his OPML Editor. I’ve been witnessing its development and launch for a while now, and I’m impressed. The first time I saw the software in action was earlier this year in New York (Dave gave me a demo). The second time I saw it was just before the Gnomedex conference this year in Seattle. That’s about the time that Dave put his marketing efforts into high gear. Step 1 – Dave “Sneezes” towards other Sneezers After the sofware was (mostly) baked, Dave invited a small group of trusted friends to bang on it. Because this was such a select group, the people involved really felt special (and they were). They went out of their way to provide good feedback. He took their input and made changes. Then he increased the size of the group to 20 or so (I was in this group). At Gnomedex, he increased the size further. All the while, Dave was getting free QA and product work, and these people were blogging about how awesome and powerful it was. Lots of people read the blogs of the testers, and want to know more. Heck, I begged him to be on the invite → Read More
Company: Pandora (formerly Savage Beast Technologies) Launched: July 21 (private alpha) Public Beta: Within two weeks Employees: 50 (including 30 musicians) Location: Oakland, CA Overview: Do you love music? Are you the kind of person who’s pissed off because your iPod only holds 60 gigs? If you are, stop reading this, click over to Pandora and request an invitation to their private alpha right now. Then come back and read the rest of this post. If you don’t agree that this is the coolest application you’ve seen in a long while, re-read this post over and over until you agree, because you are wrong. I am in love with Pandora. It’s like the Internet was invented so that Pandora could be. I met with Tom Conrad, Pandora’s CTO, today at Bar Camp and he gave me a private demonstration. He’s presenting to the group today at 5 pm as well. What is it? It is a music recommendation engine and player and it is the future of discovering the long tail of music. Pandora is a technology based solution. They spend about 20 minutes analyzing the identity of a song (“everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony”) – and they’ve analyzed 300,000 of them (10,000 artists) over the last five years. See Pandora’s Music Genome Project – a five year project involved scores of musicians to analyze music: On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever. Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like. Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute → Read More
Company: Skylook Launched: July 27, 2005 Location: Melbourne, Australia Overview: Outlook is cool. Skype is cool. Get a couple of Australians to bang them together and what do you get? Skylook. It skypefies Outlook and it’s awesome. Skype does already have a product for Outlook, which we profiled last month. Skylook is much more advanced and easy to use (although, unlike Skype’s Outlook Toolbar, it is not free). The download is about 2.2 mb. You can try it out for free with a 14 day trial. $29.95 after that to purchase. After installation, there are three main feature areas that I like. The first feature I like is auto-recording of all skype calls and IM chats. After recording, Skylook places the file in a special folder and they can be forwarded via email, searched, etc. The second feature I like is that you have presence information for skype contacts directly within Outlook, and you can start IMs and voice calls directly from Outlook. The third feature I like is the ability to “one click” call contacts via either skype or skype out, directly from their vcard. Skylook’s CEO, Jeremy Hague, wrote to me and included the following information: What differentiates Skylook from the Skype Outlook toolbar? Skylook is much more than an Outlook toolbar for Skype. Skylook does for Voice and IM what Outlook does for email. Skylook allows you to store and later retrieve all of your Skype communications, in exactly the same way you store and retrieve emails today. Outlook is a great tool for managing email. It lets you store, organize, sort and search in many different ways. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use all those great Outlook features not just on email, but on all of your communications? Skylook lets you do just that. Skylook records all voice calls as items in a special Outlook folder. Each item includes details such as who you called, the duration of the call etc., but best of all the actual conversation is recorded as a high quality MP3 file and included as an attachment to the item. Because this is saved as a standard Outlook item, just like an email, you can file it for later reference in exactly the same way as you do with email. Skylook also records all text chats as items in Outlook. Each item includes details such as who took part in → Read More
Today I drove over 300 miles (Los Angeles to Palo Alto) to get to Bar Camp. I believe that was the farthest distance anyone traveled, although I haven’t fact-checked that yet. In fact, I haven’t fact checked anything below, so if there are errors please email me or leave a comment and I’ll fix it. It was worth the drive. The event started at 7:00. Everyone had to “sign in” and “take a picture” which consisted of writing your name in a marker pen on a long scrolling paper and drawing your own avatar. People loved it – and there were a lot of people (minus a few stragglers who never made it out of the cafe ). There was a working “wiki” literally written up on a whiteboard (real wiki here) and people were free to add discussion topics to the agenda for either of the two meeting rooms. Pizza was delivered. There was a referigerator full of beer (less full later in the evening). And there was wide open wifi. Paradise. My notes for the day are below. This is by no means a transcript of what happened (there was just too much). But it is my views and opinions on the stuff I was able to participate in. “Opening Session” After introductions (led by Andy Smith and Chris Messina from Flock), Ross Mayfield led a discussion about how to (quickly, easily, informally) create a communication and feedback mechanism for attendees (including those not physically present). Lots of good ideas, mostly centered around the wiki since it’s up and running. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, check out Chris’ post on how Bar Camp was created. WikiWyg Ross also spoke about a new product that Social Text has soft-launched, called WikiWyg. It deserves its own profile (and will get one if I can corner Ross long enough to talk about it a bit more), but it is basically a tool to allow people to edit wiki’s without using wiki code. Try out the demo – you can double click on any text on the page and toggle between a wysiwyg editor, a wikitext editor, and preview. If they add authorization functionality, this would be one great way to edit your own blog, as well. Mobido Mike Prince, the founder of Mobido, gave a brief demo of his company. There wasn’t enough time for me to → Read More
Company: Rojo Previous Profile: June 17, 2005 Location: San Francisco Rojo launched two new features this week: expanded tag functionality and top 100 feeds. Top 100 Feeds: Rojo now lists the top 100 feeds subscribed to by users. The top ten include the usual suspects, which at least shows that Rojo users are pretty mainstream v. other readers. They call it the Rojo 100. You can also view the most read feeds for any given tag. This second part is more interesting. The top 100 is just another list – not super interesting as a stand alone feature. However, the ability to type a tag and see the most popular feeds based on the tag is, actually, quite useful. In particular, we like the results for the tag “Web2.0“, which lists Read/Write Web and TechCrunch in the top two spots (looks perfect to us!). Now you can see the most read feeds in Rojo at any one time. Call it the Rojo 100. This list will change all the time, as Rojo users reading habits grow and evolve. Lists are all the rage these days, but while the list of the top 100 most read feeds in Rojo might be interesting, what’s MORE interesting is seeing the most read feeds in a particular topic area. To find the most read feeds in any number of topic areas, simply search for a feed tag–that is a word used to describe an RSS feed–in our feed tag directory and sort the results by popularity. This way you will find the most read feeds in a particular subject area in Rojo. Turning attention into serendipity–that’s what we are about. RUGFEED: Rojo is one of the only feed readers to allows tagging of feeds and posts. They are starting to release tools to help users find new content based on other users’ tags. Check out popular feeds based on the tags you select: This week in Rojo a cool new feature: The Rojo User Generated Feed Directory! (RUGFEED??) Can’t find the RSS feed you are looking for? Our feed directory of around 100,000 feeds has been categorized by YOU–the Rojo user. In the “Tag” section of Rojo there is now a “Feeds” sub-section where you can find the most recently and most frequently tagged feeds in Rojo. You can also scope feed lists by All Users, or just your contacts–or yourself. The most commonly → Read More
Company: Protopage Launched: May 15, 2005 Location: London Overview: Virtual desktops are in vogue this week. Unlike Goowy (profiled yesterday), which is flash based, Protopage is all Ajax, baby. Visually is is both functional and beautiful. Drag, drop, add, and delete. Totally cool. Applications are somewhat limited for now: sticky notes, to-dolists, favorite links and quick searches. Also, the initial start page is a bit crowded, although it took only a few minutes to customize it. I imagine they’ll have RSS, email and other cool widgets added soon – more are definitely needed. What’s the business model? No idea. It’s totally free and sans-ads, at least for now. No registration at all is required to use it, although to name the page you need to go through an email verification. Check it out. Additional Reading: goodblimey, foundontheweb, WorkHappy, downloadsquad, El Telendro, EducationalWeblogs, Slapjack, → Read More
Company: Blogtronix Launched: August 17, 2005 Location: Oakland, CA (with offices in Colorado and Bulgaria) Overview: Corporations, even big corps, are starting to blog and otherwise interact directly with their customers. New startups are rushing to fill the blogging needs of these corporations. Blogtronix is the newest entrant in this space. Announced yesterday, Blogtronix is headquartered in Oakland, CA, and has additional offices in Colorado and Bulgaria. Blogtronix is a novel corporate blogging and business networking company, enabling businesses, universities, web portals and government agencies with secure on-demand services built on the Microsoft’s .NET platform. Blogtronix Corporate is the only corporate blogging system on the market to incorporate product blogging and rating for optimal marketing reach and customer feedback. Link The service is young and the site is not fully functional yet, but there appears to be a real service here. Blogtronix offers: secure corporate blogging social networking podcasting videocasting custom design more We’ll watch this one as it develops. We note, however, that criticism is already being throw their way. Roland Tanglao laments Blogtronix’s choice of the .NET platform over open source solutions: Pure FUD. Perhaps Vassil doesn’t realize that 1000s of companies are happily using LAMP and other open source solutions for their blogging and business networking needs without fearing the integration bogeyman. In 1999, companies were wary of using open source, in 2005 it’s a no brainer. I see Roland’s point, although a lot of companies out there love .NET and may embrace this solution simply because it will (hopefully) integrate seemlessly with their current IT platform. A boring, but secure, solution may be just what they want. Team: Vassil Mladjov, co-founder and ceo George Athannassov, co-founder and business development Bojidar Zashev, vp development Hristo Serafimov, CTO Dim Draganov, Software Architecture Nik Dimitrov, Tech Project Manager Ivan Popgruev, vp products development Boyan Stanoev, legal counsellor Link → Read More
Niall Kennedy just announced that Technorati now allows multiple tag search. With this new functionality, you can do a single search and find posts that have any of the two or more tags you type in. Niall says: You can now search Technorati for multiple tags! Just separate each tag with the word “OR” to add an posts tagged with your specified tag to your search results. Multiple tags are a great way to follow your favorite topics while accounting for the variety of methods people tag their posts. A tag search for college OR university displays the latest posts indexed by Technorati tagged with either “college” or “university.” You could also mix tags in an area of interest such as tracking the mobile gaming industry through a tag search for PSP OR GameBoy. I am sure you have many more ideas how multiple tag search can help you discover new content and keep informed of the latest events in the topics you care about. Enjoy! Ok, cool. This saves a bit of time on certain searches. Want to really wow us? Create “AND” functionality and allow us to filter by multiple keywords. That will get us to super-relevant results, fast. Previous Technorati Posts by TechCrunch: August 11, 2005, June 20, 2005 and June 11, 2005 → Read More
Company: Goowy Founded: August 2004 Launched: April 2005 Location: San Diego Overview: Goowy has rebuilt a number of commonly used applicatons (like email) in Flash. It includes traditional web services such as email, contacts, calendar, games and widgets. Goowy is highly interactive and, as you’d expect with a flash application – fast. Visually it is a very beautiful site as well, and I wasted a good amount of time today playing around with the applications (including some very addictive games). Goowy is one of the first full featured internet applications that uses Flash 8. For more detail, see Mike Schleifstein‘s post on Goowy, although I disagree with some of the conclusions in this post – Ajax, xforms and other technologies are gunning for some of these same applications right now. Flash-heavy sites are, however, currently quite trendy, and Goowy seems to be one of the best implementations. While flash can be heavy work for some simple stuff, Macromedia’s current efforts with Flex (as Mark Birbeck tells me) will make Flash a lot easier by using a high-level language on the server. Once you’ve registered for the service, a virtual desktop appears that allows you to access the various applications. The email application is excellent. You are assigned a goowy address (ours is techcrunch@goowy.com), and it also allows users to POP into Goowy from other accounts. Alex Bard, Goowy’s CEO, tells me that they are expanding email capabilities in the near future. Alex also tells me that Macromedia has been very supportive of Goowy, which explains how they have grown to 30,000 users with virtually no marketing: Macromedia has been a great partner to us. They have supported us in both marketing and development. We have been mentioned in several Macromedia press releases including the most recent Studio 8 release. In addition we have been their site of the day several times (most recently on Aug 9th). In addition we are working with them on more awareness / marketing initiatives in the near future which are very exciting. Alex also wrote to me about upcoming features: We have some very exciting functionality in our development lab right now. In the next 30 days we are releasing an advanced calendar and some other “fun” features. In addition we have virtual desktop storage, wireless integration, video streaming, widgets, open APIs, and more in development. It is going to be an exciting time for → Read More
Every once in a while I am surprised by some of the new web-application ideas people come up with. Some are bad – in fact, it’s disappointing to see so many applications launched just for the sake of launching -, but sometimes (just sometimes) you can actually feel when a project is set to solve a problem, even if for a small group of people. VitalSource was announced yesterday, and I must admit I’ve been thinking about what its impact might be. Since you’re probably wondering by now, VitalSource is a web-application with the iTunes-twist. It consists of a client-side application (currently available for your Mac or Windows machine) that allows you to “buy books as you buy your music”. A quote from their press release explains it best: Now students can buy their books like they buy their music – by downloading them off the Internet. The Store offers more than 1,000 titles in the VitalBook(TM) digital format, starting from as low as $.99 to 60 percent off list price of hardcopy versions. The growing inventory of VitalBooks includes classics such as Shakespeare, reference materials, and textbooks in subjects ranging from law to philosophy to medicine. On formats and openness: VitalSource sure sounds promising. This wouldn’t be an article by me if it didn’t have an ammount of constructive criticism and question asking, though. There’s a few issues that come to my mind about this application: 1) If they are targetting students, why not support an operating system that students seem to be using more and more? You know, Linux. I can imagine some people climbing up their chairs screaming “market share! market share!”, but this is a matter of accomodating a lot of people from one of the major target markets – students (and very importantly I imagine, IT students). 2) I’m always sceptical when I see a new proprietary format for any kind of information, particularly now that the web is all about reusing content and taking advantage of open formats. Naturally, VitalBook is proprietary because (and I’m assuming here, people) of piracy issues, and in order to provide DRM. But that raises some questions about the use of a Book bought in VS outside of VS itself. Will it have a use? Will it be possible to read? People are starting to read on their computers, I agree, but is the market share worth it? Wrapping → Read More
Company: Bitty Browser Launched: May 2005 Location: New York, NY Bitty Browser is a mini-browser that can be embedded into a web page. It is the creation of Scott Matthews. I spoke with Scott earlier today. He’s taking customer feedback and will be releasing new features soon. Scott calls his project “picture-in-picture” for the web. He also points out that it is a perfect way to bridge the gap between mobile and normal content – Bitty Browser is a good way to pull mobile content into a website. Bitty Browser is built on javascript, works with virtually all web browsers and has some nice shortcuts to view feeds, delicious tags, etc. For more information, see their help page. We created a browser showing the TechCrunch RSS feed in a couple of minutes (I haven’t embedded it into the post because feed readers seem to often break html). For addtional information, see Fred Wilson and Erick Schonfeld. → Read More
What a great weekend to be in the bay area: BAR Camp on Friday-Sunday: For those of us not invited to Foo Camp this year, there is an alternative which looks to be equally (or more) exciting: BAR Camp. No invitation required. It’s not anti-Foo Camp, it’s just different. I’m looking forward to attending (and blogging) about the event. As Ross Mayfield says, “The important thing is that when good people get together, great things happen.” Socialtext is donating the use of it’s office and wifi. Ross Mayfield: Bar Camp is not anti-FOO OPML RoadShow on Saturday: From Dave Winer on Geeks.opml.org: OPML Roadshow in California, August 20, 7PM! Mark your calendars, the OPML Roadshow comes to California on August 20, in Berkeley, at the Hillside Club. 7PM. This is the largest venue so far, it can hold over 200 people. It seems we’ll likely fill a good portion of the seats. And if the OPML Editor isn’t publicly available by then, I’ll do something memorable and just a little embarassing. Thanks to Sylvia Paull and Jeff Ubois for helping put this event together. This is an open event, anyone can attend. We’ll be at both. → Read More
Company: Kahuna (Hotmail Ajax Beta) Status: in private beta Location: Mountain View, CA Kahuna (the new hotmail with Ajax) hasn’t launched yet, but the Start.com team (profile) has been working on it seriously since May 2005 and it is now in private beta testing (updated). From posts by the Kahuna team (see below) and various beta testers (and others watching the space), it looks like it as as signifcant an enhancement to Hotmail as Start is to the old MSN portal. It appears that they will be launching the service under the URL mail.start.com. Key features include liberal use of ajax to eliminate screen refreshes, an “outlook�? approach to allow reading of emails without leaving the inbox, and a generally faster and cleaner user interface. Details of the recent history of Kahuna can be found here. From Imran Qureshi, Kahuna team member: Top 5 reasons I love the mail beta… reasons 1 and 2 Mail beta is a brand new web mail experience focused on being faster, simpler and safer than existing web mail services (read more). The team focused on the basics of reading and sending mail. Mail beta is a work-in-progress and a large number of beta users are driving what it becomes (we can barely keep up with all their ideas…) Here’s the first of some of my favorite things about reading mails in mail beta: 1. Fast, faster and faster still Mail beta is significantly faster, I mean by an order of magnitude: a) The UI responds instantly to many actions and quickly to others b) Very few context switches (where the whole page changes and your eyes have to rescan) c) You need fewer clicks to do the everyday tasks d) Cleaner look (including more “white space�?) so your eyes can relax and find stuff faster 2. Read mail without leaving your inbox using the Reading pane The Reading pane allows you to read your mail without leaving your inbox. If you like the reading pane in Outlook now you have it in web mail. Other web mail services forces you to open each message and close it before reading the next message. If you have 10 messages to read, they will require 20 clicks, Kahuna: 10. (How’s that for your carpal tunnel?) Want to see a wide email? Just double click the message and voila! We’re looking forward to testing this out ourselves. → Read More
Service: Vemail Company: NCH Swift Sound Download Link: Here Location: Australia Overview: Vemail is a cool little (234k download) voice-2-email application for windows machines. There aren’t many features, but it does what it does well. Once you install and launch the application, you simply type in an email address (no support for multiple emails), hold the F6 button and talk. If you have a microphone, it will record what you say, and once you let F6 go, it will email the file as a sound file to the selected email address. I did a quick test email and sent it to myself. A 14 second message was only a 23k wave file, emailed to me with the subject line “Vemail Voice Messageâ€? (note that you cannot change the subject line of the email). The quality was great, the file size was manageable and overall it worked as promised. It is also free, which we approve of greatly. Try it out, and drop us a voice message at editor@techcrunch.com. Compare this service to Springdoo, which we profiled on July 27, 2005. Note that Springdoo is located in New Zealand, and Vemail is Australian. We like the rivalry. We also hear whispers that Nivi may be coming out with something somewhat similar, but much more interesting, in the near future. Additional Links: Lockergnome, Jan in Malaysia → Read More
We’ve had a slight increase in traffic these last few days and apparently our server had something to say about it. We’ve lost everything since yesterday (last backup) but will get the recent posts up again later tonight. Apologies. → Read More
Company: Del.icio.us Previous Posts: July 10, 2005 and June 16, 2005 Overview: Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service (see previous profiles above), launched two new important features recently – Recomendations and Search. Both of these features are much needed tools to help users find tagged URIs. These tools will greatly assist users in researching related tags and to find good, related content to stuff they are interested in. Recommendations: Josh released a recommendation tool a few days ago: people who like recommendations also like… We’ve released the new recommendation engine. If you have more than ten urls saved in a tag, you will be offered several urls as well as other people’s tags that the system thinks you will be interested in. The URL pages also now offer the chance to see other related URLs. If you are on a particular del.icio.us user page (del.icio.us/username/tag), there is a link to see “recommended” tags that other people have used. This information is extremely useful in researching specific tags and how other people are tagging similar URIs. Related URL’s are also recommended in the URL page of a bookmark. Brian Del Vecchio (good screen shots), Library Clips and Saurier Duval also write about this. Search Josh released search a few hours ago: search me I’ve released a simple implementation of search across all users. If you are logged in, hit “search” and then be sure you check off “entire site.” This has been a badly needed service and others have tried to fill the void while Josh built it. There is now a search bar at the top of your personal Del.icio.us page (you must be logged in), and you can search your own tags or click “search entire site” and get tag results across all users. I’ve tested it out and it works very well. I’m not sure if the new search feature allows searching of multiple tags – an attempt gave me an internal server error. This is an important feature to be able to filter results accross multiple tags. I’m hoping he adds a feed link for results in the very near future. → Read More
Web 2.0 This Week August 6 – 13 This has been a week of challenges and successes. Challenging because I am on a driving trip from Anacortes, WA to Los Angeles, and although you can now get internet access while flying, I have no tools for getting access in a car, or dealing with sun glare. Successful because we’ve met and profiled some great new companies (see no. 1 below), and have had a number of great links to our site. Thank you to everyone who visits our site or reads our feed. Here’s this week’s summary. For additional web 2.0 information, thinking and reporting, I highly recommend Richard MacManus’ Web 2.0 Weekly Wrapup. Check out this week’s wrapup here. 1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week Indeed (raises money), YouTube, MSN Filter, Podshow (raises money), Browster (firefox version released), Pluck (new product releases), Qumana (new feature), Pheedo, FeedCatch, Consumating 2. Technorati published Parts 4 and 5 of “State of the Blogosphere” Dave Sifry and Technorati further updated their March State of the Blogosphere data (see last week’s web 2.0 summary for Parts 1-3) with information about Spam and Fake Blogs and The A-List and the Long Tail. “[T]he most influential media sites on the web are still well-funded mainstream media sites, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. However, a lot of bloggers are achieving a significant amount of attention and influence. Blogs like bOingbOing, Daily Kos, and Instapundit are highly influential, especially among technology and political thought leaders, and sites like Gizmodo and Engadget are seeing as much influence as mainstream media sites like the LA Times.” Part 4 Part 5 For other news/gossip on Technorati, see our post Technorati (being acquired?). Also, see Susan Mernit, saying “Update: Latest word– this is an untrue rumor, not reliable.” 3. Behaviors of the Blogosphere: Understanding the Scale, Composition and Activities of Weblog Audiences Comscore published a blog report on August 8 with some seriously contentious data. It was announced by Fred Wilson on August 9, and everyone’s been buzzing about it this week. Comments include “Clearly the data is way off” (see the comments to Fred’s post), “I don’t know what Comscore was thinking when they printed this data” (Jason Calcanis), “Jason Calacanis is having proper conniptions over the comScore marketing study on blogs released this week” (Jeff Jarvis – this is my personal favorite quote), “I know it → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
